Hawksmoor, Nicholas

Hawksmoor, Nicholas (c.1661–1736). 250 years after his death some late 20th-century critical opinion hails Hawksmoor as the most interesting and daringly original architect England has produced, if not the greatest. The process resulting in this reappraisal has been one of informed deduction made the more complex because of the problems in distinguishing the collaborative work of Hawksmoor from that of his chief partners, rather than masters, Wren and Vanbrugh. Hawksmoor, self-schooled in the architecture of the classical world (though he never went abroad), ultimately, and above all in his seven London churches built during the twelve years 1712–24, revealed a profoundly original control of mass, if not of the play of light, over complementary broken surfaces. St Anne, Limehouse, St George-in-the-East, and Christ Church, Spitalfields, are all examples of a rare genius. For all Hawksmoor's indebtedness to contemporaries, a modernity stemming from primal forms seems to link him with the explosive, revolutionary imaginations of Ledoux and Boullée (active in France c.1760–1800).

David Denis Aldridge